Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar Quotes
-
Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured.
-
The yogi learns to forget the past and takes no thought for the morrow. He lives in the eternal present.
-
While doing the postures, your mind should be in half-consciousn ess, which does not mean sleep. It means silence, emptiness, space, which can then be filled with an acute awareness of the sensations given by the posture. You watch yourself from inside. It is a full silence.
-
Nothing is achieved by a mind that doubts
-
Backbends are not poses meant for expressionism. Backbends are meant to understand the back parts of our bodies. The front body can be seen with the eyes, but the back body can only be felt. That's why I say these are the most advanced postures, where the mind begins to look at the back.
-
The needs of the body are the needs of the divine self, which lives through the body.
-
We can wash the skin of our bodies with a bath, but through asana practice we not only purify our blood and cells, we are cleansing the inner body as we practice.
-
A yogi's brain extends from the bottom of the foot to the top of his head
-
If you practice yoga every day with perseverance, you will be able to face the turmoil of life with steadiness and maturity.
-
Intellectuals tend to be arrogant. Intelligence, like money, is a good servant but a bad master. When practicing pranayama, the yogi [makes] himself humble and without pride in his intellectual attainments.
-
Yoga has a threefold impact on health. It keeps healthy people healthy, it inhibits the development of diseases, and it aids recovery from ill health.
-
Abhyasa (practice) is a dedicated, unswerving, constant, and vigilant search into a chosen subject pursued against all odds in the face of repeated failures, for indefinitely long periods of time.
-
Is it necessary to practice all these asanas, further and further? Is it necessary to develop scientific researches further and further? To a yogi, the body is a laboratory, a field of experiments and perpetual researches.
-
Love begets courage, moderation creates abundance and humility generates power
-
When you cannot hold the body still, you cannot hold the brain still. If you do not know the silence of the body, you cannot understand the silence of the mind. Action and silence have to go together. If there is action, there must also be silence. If there is silence, there can be conscious action and not just motion.
-
When you are practicing, do not just do that for the sake of doing. Learn to reflect while you are practising. Make your mind and brain observe and relearn what you are doing. Doing is mechanical; learning is dynamic.
-
Not all practitioners can jump to that highest level. They have to climb, step by step from the physical sphere to reach the spiritual sphere. If it is treated as exercise it is not the fault of yoga but of the practitioners.
-
Keep your attention internal, not external, not worrying about what others see, but what the Self sees.
-
Balance in the body is the foundation for balance in life.
-
As long as you do not live totally in the body, you do not live totally in the Self.
-
We are creatures that are designed for continual challenge. We must grow or we begin to die....So just standing still isn't really an option. We have to move on. If not, disturbances will come.
-
Savasana is being without was, being without will be. It is being without anyone who is.
-
During inhalation, the breath should move exactly like clouds spreading in the sky.
-
I don’t bring yesterday’s poses to today’s practice. I know yesterday’s poses, but when I practice today I become a beginner. I don’t want yesterday’s experience. I want to see what new understanding may come in addition to what I felt up to now.